Baidu Is Mashing Up Human Faces in the Name of Artificial Intelligence

Baidu Is Mashing Up Human Faces in the Name of Artificial Intelligence

Ever wondered what your face would look like if you mashed it together with President Barack Obama’s? How about Katy Perry’s? Mark Zuckerberg’s? Well, the wait is finally over! This week, Chinese search giant Baidu launched FaceYou, a new app that distorts human faces into whichever bizarre mashup you can dream up. FaceYou John F. Kennedy + Kurt Wagner The point of the app is to show off Baidu’s artificial intelligence technology, the kind of tech that Silicon Valley’s most notable giants are scrambling to wrap their brains around. As explained in a Baidu press release, the tech inside FaceYou uses convolutional neural networks, a type of deep learning that helps computers recognize patterns in image pixels. The tech within FaceYou identifies 72 “facial feature points, defining the mouth, nose,…